Part 4: Sanders' tale

Hyde and Anne listen to a survivor's tale.

“What about the surprise?”  Anne said as she sat with her jacket in her hands.

“You’re going to love this.” Hyde said as he lifted two objects from his pack, his back turned to Anne.

Anne’s eyes lit up as she saw the coloring book and crayons.

“Oh Hyde! Thank you so much!”

She ran over and hugged him tightly. Within seconds she was on the ground with the book open in front of her, she had turned to a picture of a cockatoo.

“What color are cockatoos?” She asked.

“Any color you want them to be.” He said.

“Okay.” She picked out a bright red crayon and began coloring the bird’s crest.

Hyde had taken out of the mystery novels and was thumbing through it. The picture on the front was of a buxom woman with raven hair and a tight red dress clutching a pistol. The title was printed in a large font.

Hyde read for a few minutes until he felt a hand upon his shoulder.

He turned around to see Anne holding a colored picture of the cockatoo.

“Do you like it?”

“Yeah I do.”

It was colored neatly, with the bird colored a bright, rosy purple with green feathers on the wings. The scent of wax clung to the paper.

She handed it to him and went back to the book. She turned to a page with a zebra and began picking out colors.

Hyde folded the page with care and slid it into his coat pocket.

His mind turned to the three vagrants he spotted earlier. He felt guilty for avoiding them, though he suspected they were either long gone, or dead.

 

 

 

 

He looked at his hands. They were rough, callused and under his fingernails was layer after layer of black dirt.

He opened his knife and began picking out the dirt with the blade. It was thick and grainy, with a smell he had long since learned to ignore. Out on the road, there was a man, crooked and lean, his eyes shifting back and forth. He was carrying a wood cutting axe; the lower part of the handle was wrapped in duct tape. He was walking with a dog on a leash. The dog was a big, shaggy, brown spitz-type dog that walked quickly and confidently on the end of his leash. The man moved silently and carefully.  Hyde watched as the man and his dog until both were out of his sight.

Anne had walked over to him.

“Did you see the dog?” She asked him.

“Yeah.”

“Was it a stray?”

“No, stray dogs don’t look that healthy.”

“So it was a good dog?”

“Yeah.” Hyde said as he folded his knife up and pocketed it.

“It was a pretty dog.” She said.

“Yeah it was.”

 

 

 

They were on the move again minutes later.

A motorbike lay on the side of the road. Its wheels and gas tank had been removed.

Anne kicked a bent aluminum can along as she walked. There was a suit jacket hanging from the branches of a tree. An old television with the screen broken out lay in the middle of the road. Bits of dried grass lay in the corroded inner workings where some animal had made its home there.

 

 

 

 

They strolled along. Hyde had stopped for a moment to check his shoes.

They were weathered and caked with dust and lined with thick, crude stitch marks where he had tried to mend them himself.

There was an old house up ahead. The siding was falling off and there was a rickety white fence around the yard with some of the planks missing or broken in places.

“What is it, Hyde?” Anne said as Hyde studied the house.

“Let’s check it out; there might be something in there.” He said

“What if the bad people are in there?”

Hyde pulled the little snub-nosed pistol out of his pocket. He showed it to her

“We’ll be ready for them.” He said.

The porch was strewn with dead leaves. Lounge chairs sat with the cushions stained to the point where it was impossible to tell what color they had been.

The lock on the front door had been jimmied by some previous visitor. It creaked as Hyde swung the door open.

Hyde had the pistol out and slowly walked in. Inside was a small living room. A fireplace filled with ash sat in the front of the room. There was a tan recliner in the corner. In the center was a glass coffee table, looking as new as the day it was made. Hyde carefully patrolled the house with Anne close behind him.

There was a narrow hallway with a cream colored door at the end of it. The door was sealed with a small padlock. Hyde bent down to study the lock as Anne stood watching.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

“It’s gotta be locked for a reason.” He said as he opened the pistol’s cylinder and emptied out the rounds.

He began hammering the padlock with the pistol. The lock was made of strong stuff but Hyde kept hammering away.

Eventually the lock was forced open and Hyde tore it off the door and opened it.

There was a small flight of stairs leading down to a dark cellar.

Hyde flicked open his lighter and slowly crept down into the room.

 

 

Inside the cellar were shelves lined with jars of home-canned food. Beans, peppers, tomatoes, peaches several kinds of vegetable soup, all in neat rows with the date written on the lids in black marker. Hyde began stuffing some of the jars into his pack; he took as many as he could carry.

Anne had followed him down into the cellar.

“Is it right for us to take this?” She asked him as he took a jar of soup.

“If the people still needed it, they wouldn’t have left it behind.” He said, struggling to close his pack.

“Besides,” he added. “They wouldn’t want good food to go to waste.” The dates on the jars told him they were just a year old. They were still good for the most part.

They left the house in a hurry; it was almost certain someone else would find the house. It was getting late; the sky had turned a soft pink color.

They made another camp in the woods up ahead. They settled in a small clearing several yards in. The canopy of twisted branches blocked out the fading light of day. Hyde ventured off into the woods to gather firewood. Anne sat and listened to the sounds of birds calling and squirrels running up and down trees.

Hyde came back after five or so minutes carrying great armfuls of branches. He set them down and started building the fire.

Soon they had a big campfire going. Hyde got out the cooking pot and one jar of homemade vegetable soup. He opened the jar with some difficulty and poured it into the pot and began stirring the soup. Anne had picked up a small ladybird beetle and watched it in the palm of her hand. It was delicate and orange with a single black spot on its back. Anne wondered what the bug must be thinking as it sat at the mercy of a much larger creature.

“Remember those people from this morning?” Anne said, letting the beetle crawl around on her fingers.

“Yeah. What about them?” Hyde said as he kept his eyes on the cooking pot.

“Do you think they’re okay?” Hyde then remembered the red headed woman, how pitiful she and her group were.

“Yeah, they’re probably alright.”

“Do you think they’ll find somebody?”

“Like other good people?”

“Yes.”

 

 

“They’ll find what they were looking for, and so will we.”

They were silent for a while.

“What about that man in the graveyard? He seemed nice.” Anne said, the beetle still wandering around on her hands.

“He was strange, but I’m sure he was a pretty good guy. He was probably there to think or remember.” Hyde said.

“Remember what?”

“The way things used to be.”

Hyde turned back to the pot and pulled it off the fire.

“Are you hungry?” He asked her.

“Yeah.”

“Good. We’re going to eat real good for a while.”

Suddenly they heard the telltale rustle of feet moving over fallen leaves and twigs.

The man from the graveyard was coming up to their little camp, carrying a black duffel bag in one hand and his other hand was thrust in the pockets of his mechanic’s jumpsuit.

“Do you mind if I join you guys?” He said as he approached them.

“Please, Hyde. He looks awfully hungry.” Anne said as she looked at him.

Hyde thought for a bit. “Okay Anne, I think we have plenty for him too.”

“I hope you like soup, mister.” Hyde said to the man.

The man sat down with his bag lying beside him.

“That’ll do.”

They poured their bowls and they sat around the fire eating.

The man looked at Anne.

“What’s your name, little girl?”

“It’s Anne.”

“Anne…” He said thoughtfully. “That’s a good name.”

 

 

“What were you doing in the graveyard?” She asked him.

“I was just sitting and thinking.”

“Thinking about what?”

“Just things, like the names of friends and what they were like.”

“Oh.” Anne said, stirring her bowl with her spoon. “I don’t think I have any friends, Hyde told me that we’d have time for making friends when we find a place where there aren’t people trying to kill us.”

“Hard to trust anybody these days.” The man said as he swallowed a mouthful of soup. “There are some rotten people out here.” The man looked up at the setting sun and back at Anne.

“You’re very lucky to have someone looking out for you.”

Hyde looked at the man. “Is it alright if I call you Sanders?” He said.

“Go ahead.”

“Well, Sanders, I’ve been wondering. When you said that you have no family or friends, what happened to them?”

“Bad things happened.”

Sanders was silent for a moment, he sighed in a morose way and looked down.

“I knew it was coming.”

“What was coming?”

“This.” He swayed his hand side to side in the air, pointing out the entire world.”

“There were signs.”

Hyde looked at Sanders, he hadn’t noticed until now, but Sanders had a small, thin scar on the back of his wrist.

“Did you try to prepare?”

“I had a friend help me out, it’s the only reason I’m alive today.”

 

 

Sanders looked at Hyde.

“What about you? Did your dad do anything to get ready?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re young; you probably wouldn’t know what happened.” Sanders said as he raised the spoon to his mouth. “Probably for the best.”

Anne was looking at him.

“What happened?”

Sanders sighed again. He set his now-empty bowl down.

“It happened way back, so I’m a little hazy on the details, but I remember most of it pretty clear.”

“I was probably twenty five back then, or close. I worked at my uncle’s hardware store. I started seeing the signs about a year before it happened. At first there was a war, I don’t remember what it was about or who was against what, but it was big and long. You couldn’t have the TV on for two minutes without someone talking about a city getting blown up or troops getting shot up. It got worse in a few months. People were getting sick and the government tried to do something about it but it didn’t help much. People were mad as hell and they only got madder. When the war looked like it was going to go on for another year, people got even angrier about that.

 Another sickness hit, lots of people died and the government got blamed for not acting fast enough. Then things got really crazy in the next few months. People were in the streets beating up on police officers and raiding stores to feed their kids. When that cleared up, we all thought the worst was over, and things went back to normal for a year.

Then things got even worse than before.  People kept getting sick and many, many died. Some people started blaming it on biological weapons, others started talking about ‘dirty bombs’ going off.

There were people out in the streets shooting off guns and you couldn’t walk two blocks without seeing someone get killed. Money wasn’t worth anything anymore and people simply used dollar bills to make fires with. Stores were looted and burned down, there were gangs of men who took what they could carry and burned everything else and survivalists started gathering up guns and canned goods and hid away in remote parts of the country. Crazy preachers were telling people the world was ending, and they were pretty much right. I had a friend who invited me to his shelter to stay for a while. We were down there for six months eating out of cans and listening to the radio. Some militia lunatics started marching in the streets and raiding military outposts. They and the army fought in the streets for the longest time. Then, the government broadcasts started coming in less and less often and then, one day, they just stopped.

 

We had only enough food down there to survive another week or so. So we decided that we had to go up to see what was still standing, and to see if any friends or family were still alive. And we wandered around what was left of our town, eating what we got from the wrecked houses and buildings and trying to keep away from the thugs that stuck around looking for people to rob.” He paused for a moment.

“Let me tell you one thing. It’s damn hard walking through what used to be your town and seeing your friends on the ground, dead. I saw my uncle hanging from a flagpole by his ankles, he was full of bullet holes and there wasn’t anything left of his store but ash.”

Anne sobbed a bit. “That’s awful!”

Hyde went over to her; he rested his hands on her shoulders

“It’s bad, but it’s all over. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

Sanders continued talking

“The first few winters were just awful. The people that had food ran out and began leaving their shelters to look for things to eat.”

Hyde looked at Sanders. He began to notice how weathered, how worn down he looked.

“What happened to your friend?”

Sanders glanced down at the ground.

“We were jumped by looters one night. I managed to get away and I ran, I just ran. Even when I heard him scream for help, even when I heard him silenced by a gunshot, I ran. Sometimes I still hear his voice.”

Anne had walked over to him.

“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”

Anne hugged Sanders and sat beside him.

“Don’t do that. It’s my fault he died.”

Sanders rose to his feet.

“Thanks for the meal.”

He slung his duffel bag over his shoulder and began trudging off into the darkness.

He turned to Hyde one last time.

“I hope we see each other again.”

 

“Me too.” Hyde said in reply.

“Make sure nothing happens to your sister. She deserves better than this.”

And with that, Sanders disappeared into the woods.

“He was nice.” Anne said.

“Yeah.”

“Hyde.” She turned to look at him.

“Yeah?”

“How many good people do you think are still around?”

“I’m sure there’s still a few around someplace where they’re safe.”

“We’ll always be good people right?”

“Yeah.”

“You promise we will?”

“I promise, Anne. I promise.”

The fire died down as they laid down to sleep.

Reviews

[roarke]

This story is moving along well. Keep developing the MC's, and move the themes and plots forward. The introduction of Sanders and his information is a good way to do this. Nice job.